Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 225

July 20, 2018: KennedyStudying: The Loss of Bobby

[On July 18th, 1969, Senator Ted Kennedy was involved in a car accident that left his female companion Mary Jo Kopechne dead. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that Chappaquiddick incident and four other Kennedy familyhistories, leading up to a weekend post on cultural representations of the family!]On the possibilities of a Robert Kennedy presidency, and what was lost with his assassination.
First, I want to give this James Baldwin quote, highlighted in the wonderful documentary I Am Not Your Negro (2017), the space it deserves: “I remember when the ex-Attorney General, Mr. Robert Kennedy, said it was conceivable that in 40 years in America we might have a Negro President. That sounded like a very emancipated statement to white people. They were not in Harlem when this statement was first heard. They did not hear the laughter and bitterness and scorn with which this statement was greeted. From the point of view of the man in the Harlem barber shop, Bobby Kennedy only got here yesterday and now he is already on his way to the Presidency. We were here for 400 years and now he tells us that maybe in 40 years, if you are good, we may let you become President.” As usual, Baldwin has an excellent point—the presidency (and more exactly even the consideration or eligibility for the presidency) was itself a particularly glaring form of white privilege for more or less the entirety of American political history; even when Barack Obama finally broke through that barrier in 2008, the Birther movement (which spawned among other things our current horror show of a president) reflected a continued national inability to see an African American as a legitimate president.So like nearly all of the white men who have run for president, and certainly like those from already prominent and presidential families, Bobby Kennedy did indeed begin from a position of significant privilege. But that doesn’t mean that all those candidates were the same, nor that their prospective presidencies would have been similar. And I would argue that Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign featured a candidate who (compared to just about any prior mainstream presidential candidate) was uniquely and passionately interested in African American Civil Rights. It’s true, and important, that in 1963, as Attorney General under his brother John F. Kennedy’s administration, Robert had to some degree signed off on J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI’s initial surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. (although “to some degree” is an important phrase, as Hoover generally did what he wanted regardless of presidents or administrations). But it’s also true that Robert, who in response to a May 1962 interviewer’s question about “the big problem ahead for you,” answered “Civil Rights,” was a dedicated supporter of the Civil Rights Movement, from the biggest scales (using troops to enforce desegregation and protect Freedom Riders) to the more intimate ones (responding to Mildred Loving’s letter and helping the family pursue their ground-breaking court case). “Dr. King may be gone,” John Lewis recalls saying after King’s assassination, “but we still have Robert Kennedy.”King’s April 4th assassination took place during the 1968 presidential primaries, in which Robert Kennedy was the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination (incumbent Lyndon Johnson had decided not to run again). As Lewis’s quote thus reflects, Kennedy had brought that emphasis on Civil Rights to his campaign, along with broader but interconnected proposals for racial and economic justice, an advocacy for America’s youth, and social change. His June 4th, 1968 victory in the California primary solidified his position as the likely nominee; while addressing supporters the night of that victory in the ballroom of Los Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel, Kennedy was shot and fatally wounded by Sirhan Sirhan, a 24 year old Palestinian apparently angry at Kennedy’s support for Israel. The assassination was a horrific tragedy on its own terms, as any and all such killings are. But when we consider what a Bobby Kennedy presidency might have been—not least because eventual nominee Eugene McCarthy was soundly beaten by Richard Nixon, in a campaign in which Nixon relied overtly on the racist Southern Strategy—the tragedy is greatly compounded. We can never know for sure what Kennedy’s presidency would have looked like, but we can still mourn the loss of the chance to find out.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other Kennedy connections you’d highlight?

July 19, 2018: KennedyStudying: Conspiracy Theories

[On July 18th, 1969, Senator Ted Kennedy was involved in a car accident that left his female companion Mary Jo Kopechne dead. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that Chappaquiddick incident and four other Kennedy familyhistories, leading up to a weekend post on cultural representations of the family!]On two ways to AmericanStudy the one assassination we can’t quite accept.There have been lots of political assassinations, successful and attempted, in American history, and as far as I can tell in every case but one we’ve collectively accepted the identity of the individual who pulled the trigger. From John Wilkes Booth to , James Earl Ray to Sirhan Sirhan, Squeaky Fromme to John Hinckley, each of these assassins or attempted assassins was driven by his or her own unique and complex motivations, and some were certainly part of larger collective conspiracies—such as Booth and his cohort of Confederates or Fromme and the Manson family. Yet despite such connections, and notwithstanding the kinds of questions or uncertainties that surround any historical crime, I would argue that only one American assassination has been subject to consistent, comprehensive suspicions and conspiracy theories: Lee Harvey Oswald’s November 1963 shooting of President John F. Kennedy.So why has the Kennedy assassination been so singularly controversial? I think there are a couple AmericanStudies explanations for that trend. (To be clear, books—many, many books—have been written about the Kennedy assassination and its conspiracy theories, and I’m sure that the angles I’ll cover here are part of those existing conversations.) For one thing, as the famous 1960 televised debate between Kennedy and Richard Nixon demonstrates, this was a new era in American media, one in which television had just begun to change the way we received and understood our news and our society. Perhaps no single moment better illustrates that change than the live televised shooting of Oswald        by troubled Dallas businessman Jack Ruby. And it seems to me that seeing such an event on live television might well lead to more visceral responses to and varied speculations about it than reading a report on the shooting in the next day’s newspaper, or hearing a reporter’s description of it on the radio. Ironically, that is, the end of the same presidency that began in no small measure because of the power of television and new media has been forever clouded by those same factors.There’s another side to the media coverage of the Kennedy assassination and its aftermath, though: the power of one very determined, definitely extremist person to utilize the media to advance and perpetuate his ideas. I’m referring of course to Jim Garrison, the New Orleans District Attorney who became and has remained the leading proponent and symbol of the JFK conspiracy theories. As the pieces linked under “definitely extremist” and “perpetuate his ideas” indicate, Garrison seems to represent some of the most unlikely and even absurd sides to those theories—yet he was able to present them in media-savvy and convincing ways, to the point where he sufficiently swayed filmmaker Oliver Stone that Stone made Garrison (as played by Kevin Costner) the famous centerpiece of his controversial film JFK (1991). And in techniques like its blending of archival footage with “re-created” (fictionalized) scenes, Stone’s film extended this use of media images and narratives, making it that much harder to separate fact from fiction when it comes to the most prominent and enduring conspiracy theory in American history.Last KennedyStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Kennedy connections you’d highlight?

July 18, 2018: KennedyStudying: Chappaquiddick

[On July 18th, 1969, Senator Ted Kennedy was involved in a car accident that left his female companion Mary Jo Kopechne dead. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that Chappaquiddick incident and four other Kennedy familyhistories, leading up to a weekend post on cultural representations of the family!]On taking the long view, recognizing its limits, and trying for a balance.Edward “Ted” Kennedy did a great deal of meaningful and good work in his nearly fifty years (1962-2009) as a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts. He and his staff wrote more than 300 bills that became law, and he was a vital co-sponsor or supporter of many of the late 20thcentury’s most significant laws, from the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act to the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1991 to the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (not his finest moment or most discerning judgment, to be sure, but education reform was a widely shared bipartisan objective at the time). To my mind that legislative career and legacy stand alone in the 20thcentury, and rival those of towering 19th century greats like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Charles Sumner, and Thaddeus Stevens. Whether or not Kennedy deserved to go to jail for his role in Mary Jo Kopechne’s death (and more on that in a moment), it’s difficult to argue that the Senate and America overall would not have suffered significantly if Kennedy were not part of them for the forty years between that incident and his 2009 death.And yet. In this long-ago Talking Points Memo piece, I argued that Mark Wahlberg’s escape from virtually all punishment (either at the time or in his long and successful subsequent career) for his youthful hate crimes represented a clear form of white privilege in action. And I’m not sure there’s any other way to see Kennedy’s similar avoidance of virtually all criminal punishment for his self-confessed abandonment of the car in which Kopechne was drowning (“leaving the scene of a crash causing personal injury,” in legal terms) and subsequent lack of notification of the police for many crucial hours; Kennedy pled guilty and received only a two-month suspended jail sentence. Whether the incident permanently tarnished his reputation and political future is a separate question (and perhaps it did keep him from the presidency, although there’s no way to know that for sure and again in any case he served in the Senate for four more decades). But it’s not a question that can or should distract us from the fact that a young woman died as a result of Kennedy’s actions and negligence (to put it in the kindest terms), and he remained legally and largely unaffected for his remaining forty years of life.So while no one moment can necessarily define a life, moments of criminal behavior that result in a person’s death almost always impact the perpetrator far more than did Kennedy’s. That individual moment doesn’t entirely negate the long view of Kennedy’s career and impact, but neither does the long view in any way negate the awfulness of that individual moment. There’s no reason why we have to come to a synthesis of those two sides, of course—they’re both just part of a long, messy life and story, and any simplifying synthesis would risk eliding the messiness. But I do believe there’s reason to try to aim for balance in how we remember and tell that story. In many ways, Chappaquiddick and Kopechne were frustratingly minimized in the latter decades of Kennedy’s life, and so better remembering them is certainly an important part of that striving for balance (the new film, on which more this weekend, certainly will add to that side). But at the same time, Kennedy’s subsequent four decades of public service (far different from, for example, Walhberg’s career as a rapper, actor, and restauranteur) contributed meaningfully to the lives of numerous Americans and to the society as a whole, and those contributions are part of the story too. The additive version of collective memory isn’t always as inspiring as what I tend to focus on in this space, but I’d say it remains a consistent goal.Next KennedyStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Kennedy connections you’d highlight?

July 17, 2018: KennedyStudying: 1963

[On July 18th, 1969, Senator Ted Kennedy was involved in a car accident that left his female companion Mary Jo Kopechne dead. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that Chappaquiddick incident and four other Kennedy family histories, leading up to a weekend post on cultural representations of the family!]On the bitter divisions that preceded, and perhaps even contributed to, a tragic day.
On November 21, 1963, the day before John F. Kennedy was assassinated, numerous copies of a flyer featuring Kennedy’s picture (arranged like a mug shot) and titled “Wanted for Treason” were distributed in Dallas (most likely by members of the John Birch Society). Many of the seven (almost entirely inaccurate and ludicrously extreme) “treasonous activities against the United States” that the poster attributes to Kennedy feel, to be blunt, as if they could have been and perhaps were written about Barack Obama during his two presidential administration with virtually no changes; but while those echoes have a great deal to tell us about our contemporary moment and its historical origins and connections, they’re not my main point here. Instead, I think the flyer helps us to contextualize Kennedy’s assassination, to realize that—whether or not Oswald had the slightest thing to do with the flyer or had even seen it or anything like it—Kennedy was governing in an era of increasingly unhinged and explicitly violent (if we remember the penalty for treason) right-wing rhetoric, published and circulated en masse, for purposes that can at best be called divisive.
One problem with seemingly “lone wolf” assassinations (like Oswald’s of Kennedy, unless you go down the Oliver Stone route of course) is that the dominant narrative of such events can make it far too easy for us to elide the culture of extreme and violent oppositional rhetoric (as in the Kennedy flyer) in which the lone wolf committed his or her crime. Which is to say, it’s usually not, to my mind, either-or. There are those assassins who are obviously and centrally driven by specific historical and social contexts, such as John Wilkes Booth in his murder of Lincoln; and there are those who are pretty clearly just plain nuts, such as John Hinckley in his Jodie Foster-inspired attempt on Reagan. But in many—if not most—cases, a political assassination represents a complex combination of these two factors—an individual who is sufficiently detached from normal reality and society to plan and commit such an act, operating within a historical and social climate that fosters violent perspectives and responses and attacks on political figures.
Which leads me to a few questions about one of the most violent moments in our recent political history. Was Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’ shooter influenced by the map on Sarah Palin’s website featuring key “targeted” Democratic Congressional districts (including Giffords’) with crosshairs over them? Did he know that Giffords’ Tea Party-endorsed opponent in the preceding election was an Iraq War veteran who featured a fundraising event where supporters could come out and shoot an M16 to “help” unseat Giffords? Did the shooter have any connection to the multiple times her office had been vandalized and she had received death threats after the passage of the health care reform bill, a bill for which she voted and to which Sharron Angle and others were in part referring when they spoke of “2ndAmendment remedies” if elections don’t do the job (and Giffords did indeed win re-election)? The overt answer to all of those questions might well be no, but I believe we cannot and should not attempt to understand his actions without at least some awareness of and engagement with these contexts.Next KennedyStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Kennedy connections you’d highlight?

July 16, 2018: KennedyStudying: To the Moon, America

[On July 18th, 1969, Senator Ted Kennedy was involved in a car accident that left his female companion Mary Jo Kopechne dead. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that Chappaquiddick incident and four other Kennedy family histories, leading up to a weekend post on cultural representations of the family!]On the Cold War limits yet compelling possibilities of the famous “moon shot” speech.On May 25th, 1961, just a few months into his term of office, President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech before a joint session of Congress. The speech contained a number of sections and proposals, but it is Section IX: Space that has endured in our collective memories, for it was in that section that Kennedy famously and ambitiously argued, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” A year and a half later, on September 12th, 1962, at Houston’s Rice University, Kennedy fleshed out that goal further in another, more focused speech, laying out in detail both the histories and motivations that help explain why “we choose to go to the moon” and some of the many steps that the government and nation (with the help of scientists such as those at Rice) were taking to achieve that aim. While of course Kennedy tragically did not live to see the culmination of those efforts, NASA and the space program achieved his ambitious hopes with room to spare, launching the first manned moon voyage in July 1969, just over 8 years after the original speech.If we examine the full text of Section IX, in which the moon proposal occupies only one of thirteen paragraphs, what stands out most is just how fully Kennedy couches his space program goals in the context of the Cold War. He opens the section by arguing, “if we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take.” That is, Kennedy isn’t just linking the space race to other rivalries between the US and the Soviet Union—he’s overtly arguing that whichever nation achieves its goals more quickly and fully in the “adventure” that is space exploration might well convince other nations and communities around the world to take its side in the broader Cold War conflicts. It’s a kind of Domino Theory motivation for space exploration, and Kennedy elaborates on it throughout much of the section, such as his admission that because the Soviets have a “head start,” “we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first, [but] we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will make us last.” Perhaps it’s inevitable that Cold War fears would drive even these most otherworldly ambitions, but it’s still striking to see just how much Kennedy frames his moon shot in those terms.Despite those historical limits, however, the section’s second half features a number of compelling visions of the future. The moon proposal is only the first of four such goals, which also include: accelerating development of the Rover nuclear rocket, with the hopes of exploring “perhaps beyond the moon, perhaps to the very end of the solar system itself”; accelerating “the use of space satellites for world-wide communications”; and producing “at the earliest possible time a satellite system for world-wide weather observation.” The latter two goals in particular make clear that Kennedy was not thinking solely of a Cold War space race, nor even indeed of space exploration at all, but rather of the multiple layers of scientific and global progress that NASA and the space program could help achieve. And in the section’s most beautiful lines, Kennedy acknowledges precisely the global and human nature of those potential achivements: “But this is not merely a race. Space is open to us now; and our eagerness to share its meaning is not governed by the efforts of others. We go into space because whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share.” In Kennedy’s speech and moon shot ambitions, then, we see—as we do so often in American history—the nation’s more contingent and narrow needs yet at the same time its most ideal and inspiring visions.Next KennedyStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Kennedy connections you’d highlight?

July 14-15, 2018: Representing Race: Mystery Fiction

[On July 11th, 1960 Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird was first published. One of the most taught books in American classrooms, Mockingbirdoffers (among other things) a flawed but vital representation of race in American society and history. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of such complex racial representations, leading up to this weekend post on mystery fiction and race!]On a ground-breaking genre fiction pioneer, and a contemporary author extending his legacy.I’ve written a good bit in this space about mystery fiction, and especially the distinctly American sub-genre of the hardboiled private detective novel. I grew up reading widely and deeply in that sub-genre (it rivals only epic fantasy for the source of the majority of my pleasure reading, in fact), from the canon (Hammett,Chandler, MacDonald, Spillane) to the authors extending it in my contemporary moment (Muller, Paretsky, Grafton, Kellerman). There’s plenty of variety in those lists and their collected works, but I have to admit that there’s not a lot of racial or ethnic diversity. I don’t just mean the detectives, although they are indeed entirely white. But so (in my recollection, and recognizing that there are of course exceptions across such a wide body of texts) are their worlds, which, in 20thcentury America in general and California (setting of most of those authors’ works) in particular, is quite frankly a striking and frustrating elision. Authors don’t have to create characters or stories of any necessary type, but the worlds in which they locate those characters and stories are a somewhat different question; and to create such consistently white worlds reflects, at the very least, a particular and limited way of seeing the society and culture around them.Fortunately for hardboiled private detective novels, mystery fiction, and American culture, in 1990—right at the height of this AmericanStudier’s teenage obsession with the genre—Walter Mosley published his debut novel Devil in a Blue Dress . The first of fourteen (to date) historical mystery novels featuring World War II veteran turned detective Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, and the first of more than forty published works (again, to date!) by Mosley overall, Devil didn’t just create an African American hardboiled detective character and narrator (although it did, and Easy is one of the truly original and wonderful such voices). It also situated Easy in a post-war Los Angeles and America (the same foundational setting and society of Spillane and MacDonald’s novels, for example) that were truly diverse and multi-cultural, with storylines that both focused on the city’s African American community and examined the fraught and fragile but vital interconnections between that community and the city and culture beyond. While noting his desire to be known simply as a novelist (and he’s one of our greats to be sure), Mosley has also argued that “hardly anybody in America has written about black male heroes”—and in Easy (among other characters in his vast body of works) Mosley created one of the truly ground-breaking such fictional figures.Mosley continues to publish, both Easy novels (the latest, Charcoal Joe , came out in 2016) and overall. But other 21st century authors have likewise taken up and extended his legacy, and I would highlight in particular a writer about whom I’ve written multiple times in this space: Attica Locke. It’s not just that Locke’s amazing (and quite varied) four novels to date have all featured African American detective protagonists (most of them not professional detectives, but fitting that role nevertheless). Nor just that she situates those characters and their stories in racially diverse and significant settings, from 1980s Houston to a historic site located on the grounds of a slave plantation (among others). Instead, as that last setting intimates, it’s also and especially that Locke creates novels that explore historical, cultural, and thematic questions of race, community, and identity in America, all while fully and satisfyingly fulfilling the expectations and possibilities of genres like mysteries and thrillers. In so doing, Locke’s books take their place alongside many of the other genre-plustexts I’ve written about in this space, from Longmire to Tony Hillerman’s novels, The Wire to Justified and Deadwood , and more. Indeed, she and Mosley both exemplify like few other American artists have the ability of genre fiction to plumb the darkest and most vital depths of our history and identity.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other representations of race you’d highlight?

July 13, 2018: Representing Race: Seven Seconds

[On July 11th, 1960 Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird was first published. One of the most taught books in American classrooms, Mockingbirdoffers (among other things) a flawed but vital representation of race in American society and history. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such complex racial representations, leading up to a weekend post on mystery fiction and race!]On two ways that the flawed but compelling Netflix show challenges our conversations about race.At the heart of Netflix’s TV series Seven Seconds (2018) is a story we’ve seen far too many times in recent years: an African American teenager killed by a white cop. The details are a bit distinct from the most frustratingly common news stories (the killing in this case stems from a hit and run car accident; the cop’s colleagues attempt to cover up his involvement), and the young man’s parents and military veteran uncle (played to pitch-perfect perfection by Regina King, Russell Hornsby, and Zackary Momohrespectively) are each well-drawn and complex characters who respond to the tragedy in specific and compelling ways. There’s also something to be said for representing in a cultural work, with all the layers of creative storytelling and character development and thematic nuance that such texts can offer, a kind of contemporary news story with the broad strokes of which we all feel painfully familiar. Yet if Seven Secondsfocused mostly on this tragic and senseless death and its familial effects, it would nevertheless to my mind not break particularly new ground.Seven Seconds goes well beyond that focus, however. Its white characters, especially the cop and his crew, feel as if they’re drawn directly and relatively blandly from shows like The Shield. But two of its African American characters in particular feel far more ground-breaking and significant. The show’s principal protagonist is Clare-Hope Ashitey’sprosecutor KJ Harper, a depressed alcoholic whom we first meet attempting to argue a case in court while still drunk from the night before. As an African American female anti-hero(or at least highly flawed hero), KJ could be put in conversation with the leads of shows like Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder. But my understanding of those characters (and I don’t know either very well, so feel free to correct me in comments!) is that they are driven at least in part by self-interest (and/or their interpersonal and romantic relationships), whereas in KJ’s case her gradual commitment to pursuing a case against the police officer and his peers comes at the direct expense of her own career, reputation, and even safety and well-being. To some degree KJ remains the flawed anti-hero right through the season’s conclusion, yet in other ways she becomes a truly heroic and inspiring alternative to much of the show’s world and worldview. Makes for a pretty interesting African American protagonist all the way around!The show’s other most interesting and important character [serious SPOILERS in this paragraph] begins as a seemingly minor character and evolves into a central focus. Corey Champagne’sKadeuce Porter appears to be a childhood friend of the murdered teenager (Brenton Butler) who has since joined a dangerous street gang (a gang to which both the police and media attempt to connect Brenton as well). That’s all true as far as it goes, but what we gradually learn is that Kadeuce and Brenton were also gay and in love, a secret that the young men kept from everyone around them but that became the most powerful and inspiring force within their own individual and shared lives. The revelation allows for thoughtful examinations of how other characters—particularly Russell Hornsby as Brenton’s father Isaiah Butler—respond to this aspect of Brenton’s life and identity. But it also offers a potent representation of intersectionality, one not based in theory or philosophy but in fundamental questions about identity and what factors shape each and every life. A central goal of Seven Seconds is to create conversations that continue beyond the show’s conclusion, and to my mind it is the story of Kadeuce and Brenton that could most fully and compellingly inspire such dialogue.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other representations of race you’d highlight?

July 12, 2018: Representing Race: Rap Representations

[On July 11th, 1960 Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird was first published. One of the most taught books in American classrooms, Mockingbirdoffers (among other things) a flawed but vital representation of race in American society and history. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such complex racial representations, leading up to a weekend post on mystery fiction and race!]On the distinct but complementary visions of race and America in three rap songs.1)      “Fight the Power” (1989): I’ve written elsewhere about Public Enemy’s ground-breaking and wonderful “Don’t Believe the Hype” (1988), but in many ways “Fight the Power” (originally released on the Do the Right Thing soundtrack and subsequently included on the group’s 1990 Fear of a Black Planet album ) is Public Enemy’s most influential single track. That’s partly thanks to the particularly striking music video, and its use of both Civil Rights footage and representations of contemporary racial and social protest. But the song itself is plenty incendiary and important, as illustrated by the opening lines of its final verse: “Elvis was a hero to most/But he never meant shit to me you see/Straight up racist that sucker was/Simple and plain/Motherfuck him and John Wayne/Cause I’m black and I’m proud/I’m ready and hyped plus I’m amped/Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps.”2)      “Who We Be” (2001): The music video for DMX’s impassioned anthem uses a good deal of Civil Rights and protest footage as well, but despite that similarity I would argue that his song differs from Public Enemy’s track in a number of significant ways. For one thing, DMX’s verses focus at least as much on representing the darkest sides of African American life (in the early 21st century as well as throughout American history) as on an activist attempt to change the relationship between African Americans and their society (although his repeated titular phrase, “They don’t know/Who we be,” does reflect such an activist purpose for the song). And for another, there’s an emotional rawness and intimate personal honesty in DMX’s song (appropriately so, since it was part of an album entitled The Great Depression ) that culminates in the stunning final lines: “Somebody stop me/Somebody come and get what me/Little did I know that the Lord was ridin’ with me/The dark, the light, my heart, the fight/The wrong, the right, it’s gone, aight.”3)      “A Tale of Two Citiez” (2014): J. Cole’s track, part of his magisterial 2014 Forest Hills Drive album , certainly features a powerful such emotional rawness and honesty as well, especially in the desperate and spiritual final verse, performed partly by a child singer and partly by Cole himself. But that’s only one of many stages and sides to this complex song, which in a number of interconnected ways contrasts Cole’s hometown of and impoverished upbringing in Fayetteville, North Carolina with the glittering dreams and shady realities of Los Angeles/Hollywood. Moreover, it does so within a dark and raw chronology: in the first verse the speaker is possibly the victim of a drive-by robbery and shooting, whereas in the second verse he and his friends are the ones perpetrating that crime. On its own terms, and even more when placed in conversation with songs like Public Enemy’s and DMX’s, “Tale” reminds us both of the vital role that rap can play in representing identity and community (African American and otherwise), and of the impossibility of reducing any part of those themes to one simplistic image or another.Last representation tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other representations of race you’d highlight?

July 11, 2018: Representing Race: To Kill a Mockingbird

[On July 11th, 1960 Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird was first published. One of the most taught books in American classrooms, Mockingbirdoffers (among other things) a flawed but vital representation of race in American society and history. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such complex racial representations, leading up to a weekend post on mystery fiction and race!]On what Harper Lee’s classic novel fails to do, and where it succeeds.In this We’re History piece on the controversies or criticisms surrounding two of the most prominent books published in 2015, Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, I argued that many of the unhappy responses to Lee’s sequel/prequel were driven by the ways in which the new novel changed the character of Atticus Finch. After all, Atticus has been one of the most beloved characters in American literature since To Kill a Mockingbird’s original July 11th, 1960 publication (and even more so since Gregory Peck’s Oscar-winning portrayal in the 1962 film version), to the point where many parents have even in honor of the character. And Lee’s second novel didn’t just portray Atticus as having grown more conservative or racist with age, an all-too-common shift that would perhaps be easier for readers to accept—it also revealed that he had been affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan and other racist organizations throughout his life, radically revising the original novel’s depiction of his racial and social positions.Or at least, that’s how the new Atticus and novel felt to many readers. I’ve long been troubled by the widely accepted narrative that To Kill a Mockingbird is one of America’s best novels about race and racism—not only because there there are so many better ones that should be much more widely remembered and read, but also and more importantly because (as I also argue in that We’re History piece) Mockingbirdisn’t really about African American histories or identities at all. To be clear, Lee’s novel doesn’t necessarily pretend to be about those subjects—the book is first and foremost about narrator and protagonist Scout Finch’s maturation, and secondly about her relationship with her (in her young eyes) idealized and inspiring father; because her father is a white lawyer in a Jim Crow world where (as Lee erroneously depicts it) African Americans have no advocates from within their community, he ends up defending an African American man falsely accused of rape, but that’s a minor plotline within the frame of this secondary character. If readers have amplified that plotline into a defining American story of race and justice, something Lee’s novel quite simply is not, that’s ultimately more telling of the absence of fuller stories and histories of those issues from our collective memories.If we were able to stop viewing Lee’s novel as one of our central literary portrayals of race, it would open up other and to my mind more productive ways of reading Mockingbird. For example, the novel is particularly interesting as a depiction of a young girl struggling with narratives of gender and social expectations, linking Scout to characters like Frankie from Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding (1952) or Cassandra from Elizabeth Stoddard’s The Morgesons (1862). And, for that matter, to an African/Caribbean American young female protagonist like Selina in Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959). Issues of race, along with region and class and religion and sexuality and other factors, certainly impact each of those protagonists’ experiences and identities, which would allow for a more nuanced analysis of such themes than the celebratory anti-racist narrative that has developed around Lee’s novel. So as usual—as always, I hope—I’m not arguing for abandoning this non-favorite text, but rather for reconsidering it in ways that would be more accurate and more productive than the idealizing vision we’ve held for so long.Next representation tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other representations of race you’d highlight?

July 10, 2018: Representing Race: Borderlands/La Frontera

[On July 11th, 1960 Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird was first published. One of the most taught books in American classrooms, Mockingbirdoffers (among other things) a flawed but vital representation of race in American society and history. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of such complex racial representations, leading up to a weekend post on mystery fiction and race!]On the tough but vital book that represents an ambiguous American setting and history.
Of the many things I wish we included more fully and with more nuance in our narratives of the Mexico-United States border and the many issues that surround it, the most fundamental is the incredibly complicated and contested history of that border’s existence and location. It’s true that the border has been more or less the same since the middle of the 19thcentury, but what we almost never acknowledge is the multi-decade, deeply debated process by which it reached that identity. A more full narrative of that process would include, among other things, the secession of Texas from Mexico in 1836 to form its own independent Republic for almost a decade (a secession that the Mexican government treated almost exactly the same as the US government did that of the Confederacy before the Civil War); the process by which the US subsequently annexed Texas in 1845, a process that (because of that ongoing debate over secession) the Mexican government did not recognize; the highly suspect premises by which the US then found cause to declare war on Mexico; the details of that war itself, and of the multiple 1848 treaties that ended it and resulted in the US expanding to include New Mexico and Arizona and their borders; and the similarly contested annexation of Californiain 1850.
None of that history makes the existing border any less of a legal boundary, but it certainly would (I believe) inform our narratives on the relationship (historical and present) between the two nations, as well as on the multi-century histories of migration and movement between and through Texas, the Southwest, Mexico, and the United States. Even more significantly, such awareness would force us to engage with just how interconnected and intertwined the identities and histories of (for starters) Texas and Mexico have always been, and through them how much the cultures and communities of the two nations have blended into one another throughout the Southwest and beyond. Fortunately for such engagement, the meanings, stages, and effects of that blending, as well as its pains and promises, darkest realities and most ideal outcomes, have already been captured in one of our most challenging and difficult and disorienting and vital texts, the autobiographical-historical-psychological-anthropological-spiritual-philosophical-scholarly-poetic masterpiece that is Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). Anzaldúa’s book is written in at least three languages (English, Spanish, and Mexican Indian, although she uses multiple variations on each of the latter two), moves without warning between all of the genres contained in my hyphenated adjective, and delves into some of the most dark and uncomfortable elements of her own psyche, both nations’ histories, gender and sexuality and identity, and the most violent and hateful kinds of discrimination and injustice. And it’s one of the most inspiring and powerful books I’ve ever read.
There are lots of moments or passages which I could highlight in support of that final point, but none are more concise and powerful than two poems from the sixth and final chapter of the book’s poetic second half. “To Live in the Borderlands Means You” is perhaps Anzaldúa’s clearest statement of her book’s most central idea, the concept of a mestiza (mixed) identity that she grounds in the experiences and worlds of the border but argues is a defining attribute of national existence (especially in the late 20thcentury) beyond any specific geographic setting. The poem includes some of the book’s darkest phrases (“the rope crushing the hollow of your throat”) and yet some of its funniest (“To live in the Borderlands means / to put chile in the borscht”), and ends with a very evocative and inspiring image: “To survive the Borderlands / you must live sin fronteras / be a crossroads.” And the chapter and book’s final poem, “Don’t Give In, Chicanita” (which Anzaldúa translates into both Spanish and English), connects this complicated and vital identity to a very personal and intimate subject, Anzaldúa’s realistic and unflinching but hopeful and loving advice to her niece Missy. Nowhere else in the book does Anzaldúa make more plain nor more moving her sense that an optimistic perspective depends precisely on an understanding of the histories that comprise the borderlands, what she calls in the poem’s first stanza “your roots like those of the mesquite / firmly planted, digging underground / toward that current, the soul of tierra madre— / your origin.” An ethnic, racial, and national origin we would all do well to better remember!Next representation tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other representations of race you’d highlight?